I found a copy of the novel "Girl With a Pearl Earring" in a used book bin. Since I’ve always loved the paintings of the Dutch Masters, I bought it. And loved it.
Author Tracy Chevalier imagines the story from the point of view of the young housemaid who became the model for Johannes Vermeer’s famous portrait "The Girl with the Pearl Earring."
What struck me most wasn’t just the story, it was how vividly she described the difficulty of mixing and layering paint.
Suddenly I understood why, in Renaissance and Baroque art, we so rarely see the brilliant blue skies of September.
I knew that medieval artists had apprentices to grind pigments, and that blue was the most expensive color of all — sometimes more costly than gold.
The pigment came from lapis lazuli, a gemstone mined in Afghanistan, then hauled by camel caravans across deserts and mountains, and sold in Europe at staggering cost.
I had assumed a Dutch master could just buy paints in the market. Not so.
Artists bought raw materials... rocks, minerals, ivory, even plant parts alongside medicinal herbs at the apothecary. Then they ground them to powder, washed away impurities, and mixed the powder with linseed oil to make paint.
And of all the materials, lapis was the hardest to process and the most costly. Too costly to waste on skies.
Even Vermeer, who used ultramarine more than most of his peers, felt its burden. The price of pigment certainly didn’t help his finances, and he died in debt.
So while Vermeer gave us unforgettable images of quiet domestic interiors, he almost never painted the world beyond his windows, where no doubt, outdoors, the skies were just as brilliantly blue as they can be in September.
